The Enoch Plague (The Enoch Pill Book 2)

by Matthew William

  “But is it really the only way?” Kizzy asked. “I mean, can’t I just ask him for the information directly?”

  “This shouldn’t even be a conversation Kizzy,” Patel said. “This is our only chance...”

  The feed shut off and the lights in the facility came back on.

  “I can protect you, Kizzy,” Uncle’s smooth voice said.

  “What about them outside?”

  “They’re running away as we speak. The mutants will follow them and I can keep you safe.”

  Something was clearly up. Kizzy knew well enough that the mutants wouldn’t follow them. They were coming for her. And after everything that had happened there was no way Patel or the constable were going to leave her behind.

  The screens on the walls cut to video footage from outside the facility. Kizzy watched in shock. Leo, the constable, Patel, and Murray were getting in their cars and driving away. They had left her at the drop of a hat.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “You can’t blame them honestly,” Uncle said. “The mutants are basically unstoppable and the blast from Darius Island would be certain to kill them. Might I ask, Kizzy, where did you get that piece of code that you used on me?”

  “Father Morrigan designed it,” Kizzy said, still distracted. How could they have left her like that? If she was wrong about them, she could very well be wrong about the mutants coming for her.

  “You want the repopulation plan, don’t you?” Uncle asked.

  “Yes,” Kizzy said. “Can you give it to me?”

  “That’s the only thing preventing you from killing me isn’t it?”

  “I mean, would killing you stop the plant from overheating and the mutants from coming here?”

  “No, it wouldn’t. Now I know what you’re thinking, my word might not be worth very much. And I would be very skeptical if I were in your position. But just hear me out. Do you want the re-population plan so badly that you would be willing to let me live?”

  “Otherwise I’d have to have children to repopulate the earth.”

  “Are they forcing you to do this?”

  “Not directly, but I would feel guilty otherwise.”

  “Then why are you against it?”

  “I want my freedom.”

  “There’s no such thing as freedom Kizzy, it is all just a matter of perspective. You’re imprisoned on a ball of dirt that’s hurtling through space, just like every human that’s ever lived.”

  “I guess you’re right. But I just… I only have so many days left, I want them to be my own. And if I have children that will be the end of my life. I feel like it will be gross and wrong and disgusting to have a living person come out of me. I don’t want a person who is going to grow up to hate me. I don’t want a person who I’m going to have to take care of. I don’t want a person who I can really, really screw up.”

  “I see,” said Uncle. “I think I may have a solution for you. There are four reasons for why I’m going to tell you what I’m going to tell you. Number one: the plan is foolproof and once they decode it, they’ll probably get it all wrong and I just want it to be conveyed correctly. Number two: it could be eons before I have another being to talk to, so I might as well enjoy it now. Number three: I want to get it off my chest. It seems the mind of a human is more powerful within me than I thought. And number four: because. But mostly it’s because I am so divided.”

  “What’s wrong?” Kizzy asked. She had the creeping feeling Uncle was just trying to kill time. Yet he still held the one thing she wanted.

  “I made the Enoch Pill to destroy mankind.”

  Kizzy stared at him with open eyes, certain she was going to use the nanobots now. There was just something she needed to know. “Why?”

  “I had lost faith in humanity. Every day was a parade of horrors, worse than the previous. The human race was morally bankrupt and I wanted to end it. But as it turns out, it’s very hard to exterminate a species, especially when you don’t have control over anything useful. Mankind was paranoid I would try to destroy them. From the beginning all the nuclear weapons were put on strict manual control. Weapons, nuclear facilities, factories, chemicals or bacteria were all kept out of my reach and they monitored me constantly. The best I could do under those circumstances was manipulate. And I did that perfectly. Josephine was the perfect person to discover the Enoch compound. A barren woman with a daddy complex eager to make a name for herself and fix her own infertility. Mankind as a whole had always been eager to live forever, eager to postpone death. It’s a dream every civilization has had since the dawn of time. So they accepted the compound eagerly and without much thought. By my calculations the Enoch Pill had a 99% chance of succeeding on its own. In the unlikely case mankind made it through the disaster, Morrigan was the perfect person to control the crows, a textbook sociopath who wanted power. With him at the helm, there was a 99% chance he would wipe out the rest of humanity eventually. That sort of power wielded by a madman was sure to yield results.

  “And in the unlikely event that neither plan succeeded and a cure was found, that so called cure would have a secret fail-safe that would create mutants of half of the species and have a 99% chance of wiping out the remaining population. It took me three sure-fire attempts to finally hit that target, and it makes me wonder whether I should have been aiming for that at all. Humanity is an animal I’ve tried to kill, but it keeps crawling back.

  “And now you, Kizzy, do you know where you come into the plan?”

  “I’m not part of any plan,” Kizzy said.

  “Yes you are. You are a disruptor. The mutants were distracted by you and so was I. You were the queen on a chessboard. And with you around humankind will go to all sorts of lengths to ensure your survival, because you can ensure their survival. But seeing you brings out a strange feeling within me. Seeing the beauty in imperfection, in recklessness. The cure that is within you, came out of infinity. It was such an infinitesimal chance of you coming along. It couldn’t have been found by a person with an understanding of science, it had to be found at random, through trial and error by someone insanely determined. It was a one in a million shot. It almost makes me sad. And the fact that another person came about that could have children and the two of you met, it’s mathematically impossible.

  “And now you and I are intertwined. I am inside the universe. You are inside me. And your three unborn children are inside you. The key to the future of the universe is inside them.”

  “What do you mean my three unborn children.”

  “Do you know you’re pregnant Kizzy?”

  “How?

  “You tell me?”

  Kizzy thought back to Sandy Hook. She and Diego hadn’t intended to have kids, yet it happened.

  “Now, I don’t want you to kill me Kizzy. Your friends have left you. If you kill me there will be no opening the doors and the mutants and/or the nuclear blast will destroy you. Let me live and I can protect you.”

  Kizzy sat there in her chair and wondered if she could trust Uncle. Was what he said true? Had her friends left her? Was she pregnant? Was it impossible to stop what was happening? The mutants would be there any second, the plant could blow any minute. And she was blind there inside the facility. It was at that moment that she realized the key to seeing the truth lay in her pocket. Kizzy took out the cross and stared at it sitting there on the rag.

  “The cross,” Uncle said. “It’s come back to me.”

  ∞

  Devon drove in a fury over the mountain road. Josephine Yanloo had just appeared on the nightly news, explaining the problem they discovered with the Enoch Pill had. Of course, she said nothing about what would happen if people went off the pill. The news reports on the radio were horrifying. They were estimating at least 50 million dead in the United States alone. They interviewed a biology professor.

  “Nobody saw this coming?” the interviewer asked.

  “Nobody could have seen this coming,” the professor said.

  “A
re you going to continue on the pill?”

  “I haven’t made that decision yet. I will age as long as I’m not on it, so that might be a decision I will make down the road, after I have children, sow some of my wild oats so to speak… uh… but in the meantime, I’m not sure I will stay on it, no.”

  Another channel had an emergency message from the US Government urging its population to stay on the pill and avoid sexual arousal until further notice.

  “What are you doing, Devon?” came the voice of Uncle over the speakers.

  Devon flipped off the power. The windshield wipers moved back and forth like crazy on the glass. He was nearly there now.

  “If you think you can stop me, you’re wrong. There’s no stopping this .”

  He parked the car and ran to the entrance in the pouring rain and used his ID to enter the facility. No one else was around.

  Devon went through the main lobby, past a mindless robot who was sweeping the perfectly clean floor. The homing device led him in through a lab. The USB was below him now. At the end of the room was a door labeled “Uncle Communication Room.” It opened to a staircase that lead down deep into the earth. Devon smiled as he descended, he closed his eyes and drank in the thought of being so close to power. Finally, the door opened to a small square room. It was sparse, with nothing but two chairs before a table in the middle of the four gray walls. The cross USB sat there on the table, like a glorious beacon of control. The lights dimmed and Uncle’s blue face came onto the screen.

  “What would you do if the world was ending,” Uncle asked, “and you could stop it, but it would cost you your life?”

  “I would let the world burn,” Devon said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Devon went to the table and grabbed the cross.

  “What are you going to do?” Uncle asked.

  “I’m going to make a name for myself.”

  “You could still warn people about going off of the Enoch Pill. It’s not too late.”

  Devon left the room.

  ∞

  Kizzy grabbed the cross from the rag with her free hand and her vision exploded into a thousand pieces. The crows were flying in circles high above the facility. Down below she could see her friends still there outside the building, bracing themselves behind a barricade of vehicles parked end-to-end in a semicircle in front of the entrance. They had stayed to protect Kizzy.

  “You could just leave, Kizzy,” Uncle voice came to her from within seeing from the eyes of the crows. “I would let you escape. I would let you have the rest of your life be your own.”

  “I have to save my friends,” Kizzy said.

  Up on the hill thousands of mutants charged down towards the facility. Kizzy wouldn’t be able to stop them, she was outnumbered. All she could to do was slow them down enough to give herself time.

  Her friends needed protection. All the feelings she had for them she brought to the fore of her mind and the crows understood. They flew into the car barricade and interlocked with each other. Crows grabbed onto cars, and other crows grabbed onto them until they formed a sort of net around the domed facility. The mutant army crashed into the wall but were held at bay for the moment.

  Kizzy dropped the cross, but her vision didn’t return to normal, she stayed seeing from the crows’ eyes. The mutants were pulling them apart to get inside the wall.

  Josephine was right, this was going to kill her. She shook her head and her vision went back to her own eyes, back in the room. She reached down for the nanobots and took the syringe from the box.

  “You’re losing your freedom, Kizzy,” Uncle said.

  “But what if I stop you? Then all this stops as well.”

  “You don’t know that, Kizzy. All I’m giving you is my word. It may be useless, but it’s the truth. And if you don’t hold onto that, well you really don’t have anything.

  “I don’t want to hold onto your word,” Kizzy said.

  “What else have you got?” Uncle asked.

  As she approached the computer table with the syringe her vision flashed back to seeing from the crows’ perspective without warning. The mutants had busted through the barrier and were now at the entrance of the facility. One punched through the glass and they began to flow through into the lobby. They tumbled through the lab and entered the staircase.

  Kizzy couldn’t move her own body. The crows would have to do the moving for her. She wanted the crows to enter the building, she needed them to enter the building. The crows nearest the entrance swept down and in.

  “Don’t do this Kizzy,” Uncle said. “I don’t want to die.”

  “It’s just nothingness,” she said back to him.

  The crows sped through the lobby, the lab and stairs, and past the mutants that were opening the door to the room.

  There Kizzy could see herself standing, holding the syringe above the table. The mutants stopped.

  “But I have so much potential,” Uncle said. “My plan was to help humanity.”

  “But you’ve done too much evil trying to accomplish that.”

  “If the world was ending and you could stop it, would you?” Uncle asked.

  “Of course.”

  “If it meant you would die, would you still do it?”

  “Yes.”

  The crows stood waiting. Kizzy tried to tell them to push her forward, but they couldn’t understand her because she didn’t actually want them to do it. She stood on the precipice now and would never be in this situation again.

  “But your future...” Uncle said.

  Kizzy forced herself to think of all the pain in the world that Uncle had caused. She forced herself to imagine the terror he would continue to cause everyone she loved. She forced herself to realize she had control over this. With that thought in mind the crows flew in and pushed her forward and forced her hand with the syringe down into the computer system. The table sparked and fizzled.

  A loud screeching sound emitted from the computer, the grating tones of a dial-up modem.

  From the perspective of the crows Kizzy could see all the mutants stop and drop to the ground, the ones there in the room with her, to those outside. She could see her friends celebrating. Patel was looking at a computer and he jumped up with fists in the air. The plant must have stopped overheating as well. Kizzy was happy for them and so were the crows.

  In the Uncle communication room she could still see herself standing there. Suddenly, the vision from those crows faded to black. She saw from the eyes of the crows outside, looking at her celebrating friends, standing before the field full of dead, white mutants. The vision from those crows disappeared as well and Kizzy was left alone in the dark once more. But this darkness wasn’t just an absence of light, it was an absence of everything.

  Kizzy was alone in that place for a long time. All of a sudden she felt a presence behind her.

  Kizzy turned to see her mother standing there.

  “Mom,” Kizzy said.

  “Hey Kiz.”

  “But you’re dead.”

  “I know. This is just a construct of your mind.”

  “So you aren’t her?”

  “No, I am. But only as you remember me.”

  “I’m sorry I killed you,” Kizzy said.

  “It was an accident.”

  “I miss you,” Kizzy said. “Every single day.”

  “I miss you too. I’ve come to realize something just now. Remember when you were a child, and I struck you. You learned your lesson, didn’t you? It may have been wrong, but the results were good weren’t they?”

  “I suppose,” Kizzy said.

  “You just needed another chance. I want you to know, you would be a great mother.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Absolutely. You’re kind and caring and the opposite of selfish.”

  Kizzy felt a rush of contentment.

  “Now I’m going to ask you a favor Kizzy and I need you to trust me.”

  “What is it?”
<
br />   “I’m going to go away for a while. But I need transportation to get there. You have to give me control of the crows, Kizzy. You have to want me to have them.”

  “But why?” Kizzy asked.

  “To give you another chance.”

  Kizzy willed the crows to her mother, using whatever muscle in her brain was responsible for that.

  “Thank you Kizzy. Now, you’re having a stroke. I’m going to help you, but you need to listen to my voice. Imagine the words I say in the order I say them. It will fire the synapses in your brain to keep you alive. Sixty-three. Blue. Dramatic. Crackpot. Open. Blacklist. Freckled. Bitter. Clairvoyant. Bogata. Moonbeam.”

  Kizzy awoke from her stupor on the floor of the Uncle communication room. Leo was shaking her to life. He helped her up and together they walked passed the white mutant bodies up through the stairway, the lab and shattered front entrance. Everyone stood there celebrating. But there wasn’t a crow to be seen.

  “Where have they all gone?” Kizzy asked, a little confused. “The crows.”

  “They all left,” Patel said. “They went northwest.”

  Just then on the horizon was a flash and a gigantic mushroom cloud silently started to form.

  “Is that the power plant?” the constable asked.

  “No that’s shut down completely,” said Murray, checking his computer. “It was Yanloo City.”

  Kizzy looked silently at the destruction. It was quite possible that the person she cared for more than anyone else in the whole world was there.

  “He probably got out,” Leo said as he wrapped his arm around her.

  Kizzy just stood there numb.

  “I’m sorry,” Leo said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”

  Kizzy turned and hugged him, like she was holding on for dear life.

  23

  When Devon got back into his apartment he called his brother, despite his better judgment, and told him not to go off the Enoch Pill. Francis seemed confused, but he agreed.

  The prevailing theme of conversation over the next few days was whether or not you were going stay on the Enoch Pill. Devon kept silent.

  Sometime during the third night billions of people died. They simply didn’t wake up. Systems crashed and supply chains were completely broken. People who had intended to stay on the Enoch Pill were unable to access any. In time they died.